There has been a lot of buzz of late about “information diets”, and I never really understood until now.  In order to swim in this surging information stream, you have to be able to tame the currents.  I have begun to find my own ways of taming the currents:

1) Prune, and prune often. 
This is possibly the simplest way to cut the fat when it comes to your information intake.   Not only should you go through all of your bookmarks on a regular basis, but also cut out unnecessary friendfeeds, twitters, and RSS feeds.  In order to not be overwhelmed, I recommend doing this every two weeks or so.   You will be surprised not only at the amount of worthless links that have accumulated, but also the amount of online gems that are buried in amongst  all the fluff.  

2)  Use specialized searches. 
Finding a couple of specialized search engines for specific types of research can significantly reduce your “sifting time”.  A few of my favorites are Google scholar for work or school research, and Addict-o-matic for researching current events. 

3)  Organize your information simply and consistently.
Your RSS feeds and bookmarks should both be maintained in a streamlined form that makes it easy to file your new links, as well as easy to find the information when you need it. I also recommend finding a new way to store links to stories that you just want to read and discard. You can use a app such as Google notebook, or if you’re lucky like me you can try out the new Evernote beta. 

My current favorite is using the read it later add on for Firefox. Of course this is by no means the only way to get things organized.

The simply point is this:  in order to be the information guru that we all want to be, one needs not only to be able to get into the infostream, they need to tame the currents!

That being the case, I am confused by many similarly minded individuals rejecting any kind of green technology.   While I may agree that the climate “crisis” is by and large a lot of hyper inflated nonsense, I have no philosophical qualms about supporting green technologies.  The beauty of capitalism is that if a product or service is better, it survives, if its inferior, it gets plowed under. 

Green tech has a lot going for it, and a lot against it.  Let the market decide the fate of green technology, and leave all of the politicking out of it.  What we absolutely DO NOT need is a whole lot of red tape corralling us into using green technology.  There is no quicker way to destroy a great idea than to remove it from any form of competition. 

Michael mentioned in his post the fact that the mercury and nickel in many of today’s green tech will do far more harm than good, and he’s right.  The solution to that problem is to continue to expose that industry to market forces.  The market will figure out that using toxic substances in its products is not good for sales, and will work out a solution. 

My fear is that the powers that be (perhaps Michaels “They”?) will create a stagnant, government subsidized pit in which nickel and lead filled technologies can languish forever.  Free from the impetus to change that is competition.  All of these attempts to legislate our environmental morality are merely the latest form of the ivory tower socialistic worldview.  That worldview is that we the people are idiots and we need the government elite and the academia to legislate our lives in every conceivable manner. 

The truth is that we the people are much brighter than the elites give us credit for.  We recognize the usefulness of green tech, and we want to be good stewards of our home.  If we are allowed, I feel that our money will speak for us, and a healthy, dynamically improving green tech industry will be the result. 

But for the sake of all that is holy, don’t remove the competition!

The tech culture and blog culture in particular demands that you be on the razors edge if you want to keep up.  But what is the result of following all this minutiae? What is the price we pay for our semi-omniscience?  These are some of the questions that I have been asking myself this weekend. 

We live in a time unlike any other.  Today there is more information at our fingertips than we could ever possibly absorb, with more and more of the stuff being created every day at a furious rate.  The floodgate has been opened, and now it’s not only the academia and the published author who can make their mark on the face of society, but you and I.

All of this increased access leads inevitably to an increased interest in the minutia of life.  We now have the ability to dig very deeply into very specific topics, and then to dig even deeper.   What ramifications does this increasingly microscopic view have on our ability to connect with the big issues?  I want to share with you some results of this mindset that I see at work in our culture already.  The first thing I would like to bring to your attention is our shrinking attention span. 

We flit from one trend to the next, rarely sticking with anything for long.  We channel surf so fast that the blurring light could induce seizures, and we get impatient when our fast food isn’t prepared by the time we finish paying.  This continual need to be stimulated is ruining our ability to really delve into the issues of our time.  

As a culture, we’re losing the ability to look inward, and to remember what we see. We’re too busy reacting to the latest fad.  Another detrimental effect of this minutia culture is that we seem to be losing touch with each other.  We have dug ourselves so deeply into our sub subcultures that we are splintering along hundreds of thousands of cultural fault lines. 

It used to be in school the nerds didn’t hang out with the jocks.  Now the nerds don’t hang out with the jocks, the preps, the Goths, the Skaters, or the punk kids.  So each successive generation appears to be self isolating into an ever more specific subculture.  Within that subculture, everyone agrees with everyone else’s view of the world.  If history tells us anything, it’s that intelligent debate is what makes individuals and societies great, not universal agreement.  

All of this postulation is not to say that we should limit technology, or that our ability to have so much knowledge access is a bad thing. It is not.  It’s a fantastic thing, and this increasing access to information and data will absolutely change the face of our planet.  These thoughts are merely meant to encourage us all to think about the power that such a culture has to shape us.  We need to be the conscious directors of our destiny, not allowing information overload to shape us into isolated, over stimulated individuals, but instead using information to forge a future beyond belief.  

I would have dismissed the article out of hand had it not been written by Marty Nemko, an education consultant who has worked with the presidents of 15 universities.  Mr.  Nemko begins his piece with a statistic that absolutely floored me:

Among high-school students who graduated in the bottom 40 percent of their classes, and whose first institutions were four-year colleges, two-thirds had not earned diplomas eight and a half years later. That figure is from a study cited by Clifford Adelman, a former research analyst at the U.S. Department of Education and now a senior research associate at the Institute for Higher Education Policy.

How incredibly sad!  Imagine studying and borrowing for nearly a decade without anything to show for it but wasted time and debt.  Add to this the fact that holding a bachelors degree means less and less in today’s specialist market, and one begins to wonder whether or not all of the emphasis we put on formal secondary education is such a great idea.  I am not suggesting that high school education is all that an individual will ever need in order to be well equipped for life.  

To the contrary, I believe being knowledgeable in ones field will continue to become even more important than ever.  It is the mode of education that I'm questioning.  With more and more free learning material available online, including complete courses from such respected names as MIT and Stanford, the future of secondary education is in flux.  The form that education will take in the future is uncertain, but as is the case with most change in this information age, it will likely make education more dynamic and accessible, and that will change the world.